AGE OF THE MORDERN MISSIONARY MOVEMENT

AGE OF THE MORDERN

MISSIONARY MOVEMENT

Submitted to

Global School of Open Learning

In Partial fulfilment of the

Requirement for the Course

CHURCH HISTORY II

 by

Jose  M M

ID No. M12J025

26 November 2016

GLOBAL SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING, BANGALORE

Table of contents                                                   Page no.

Introduction:                                                                                      3

1.     Age of the modern missionary movement                                  3

2.     The positive effects of the movement.                                        4

3.     The negative effects of the movement                                        5

4.     Role of different individuals in the Missionary movement        5

a.     William Carey                                                                  5

b.      Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther                                             6

c.      Hudson Taylor                                                                 6

d.     Florence Selina Harriet Young                                        7     

5.     The effect of Theological revaluation on the growth of the church 8

a.     Darwinism                                                                        8

b.     Theological liberalism                                                      9

c.      Communism                                                                     9

                                                             

                                                                                                           

Conclusion                                                                                                  10

Bibliography                                                                                              10   

Introduction

The modern mission movement of the nineteenth century was the beginning of a new era in mission work. Before the 1800’s the church felt its call to missions consisted only of reaching the lost with the message of salvation. As the new century dawned the social and political climate began to change the missionary momentum came to a standstill. For the first time church was challenged to consider the social needs of the day. This challenge led to a new perception of missions that continue change the face of the mission work even today.

Age of the modern missionary movement

The beginning of the first era in the modern history of the missionary movement can be traced back to 1792 with the publication of a book entitled An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, written by the 31-year-old Baptist minister and former shoemaker William Carey. Carey explained why involvement in missionary work is so essential. (He was criticised severely by church leaders in England because of his conviction that "the nations of the world need Christ" and that it was the responsibility of the Christian leadership to make sure that "heathens" were exposed to the Gospel.) The book also provides readers with a brief history of the Christian missionary movement dating from the Apostolic era, as well as practical solutions on how to reach the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Carey's book caused an upheaval among some Protestant Groups. In Kettering (England) a new missionary organisation - the Baptist Missionary Society - was founded under whose auspices Carey worked in India from 1793. He was involved in missionary work in India for more than forty years. New missionary organizations were launched in England, Scotland, the Netherlands and America soon afterwards. Their aim was to send out missionaries and to motivate congregations and prayer groups to establish support networks for these workers. During the same time, Protestant missionaries from Europe and America were sent out to the New World - primarily Asia and Africa. They settled in the coastal regions and concentrated on reaching groups living in these areas. Many missionaries - especially those working in Africa died trying to fulfil their calling. During the first era and over a period of sixty years more than 90% of the missionaries who worked in Africa died within two years of arrival on the continent due to tropical diseases such as malaria.[1]

The positive effects of the movement.

The moral crusade

In the nineteenth century Christians saw many injustice in their society and they tried to correct them. By Gods power, they wanted to change the world in number of ways.

  Reforms

Preachers denounced the evils from the pulpits, newspapers printed and large meetings increased the pressure for change. Christians rallied to support many causes such as securing legal protection for women winning the right for women to vote.

In India William carry stood against the practice of Sati and encouraged education for women in India. The worked for liberation from prostitution alcohol and slavery.

Missionary work

 The concern of American Christians were not limited to their own country. Many of them were challenged by the story of Adoniram Judson to enter foreign missionary service. Many new missionary societies were established, and all denomination had mission boards to promote missionary support.

Urban needs

The rapidily growing cities posed the greatest challenge. Some of the churches established missions in the urban centres. They offered aid to the poor and alternatives to drinking and gambling, and they included aggressive evangelism. The missionaries established hospitals, orphanages and schools.

Personal holiness

With so much of wickedness in society, many churches emphasized the message that only answer was personal holiness. Holy lives that would , in turn produce a holy society. This gave rise to the holiness movement which seemed to touch all churches.

Bible translations

Bible was translated to many native languages. By the time of the death of William Carey in 1834 he translated some parts of the Bible into 40 Indian languages.

Slave trade

English evangelicals fought vigorously to abolish the slave trade. The British Parliament made slavery illegal in British land.

The negative effects of the movement

Social Ministries

Churches became institutional in an attempt to provide programs such as gymnasiums libraries, clinics, and social rooms for all aspects of life. It sometimes addressed the physical needs and did not demand a new-birth experience

Theological revolutions

There were major changes in the way some theologians understood the nature of Christianity. They declared that advances of science and historical studies demanded a change in Christianity. This theological revolution included Darwinism, liberalism and biblical criticism.

Role of different individuals in the Missionary movement

William Carey

It was in 1793 that Carey went to India. At first his wife was reluctant to go so Carey set off to go nevertheless, but after two returns from the docks to persuade her again, Dorothy and his children accompanied him. They arrived with a Dr. Thomas at the mouth of the Hooghly in India in November, 1793. There were years of discouragement (no Indian convert for seven years), debt, disease, deterioration of his wife's mind, death, but by the grace of God and by the power of the Word, Carey continued and conquered for Christ!

When he died at 73 (1834), he had seen the Scriptures translated and printed into forty languages, he had been a college professor, and had founded a college at Serampore. He had seen India open its doors to missionaries, he had seen the edict passed prohibiting sati (burning widows on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands), and he had seen converts for Christ.[2]

Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther 
Ajayi was in his 12th year when he was captured, along with his entire village, by Muslim Fulani slave raiders in 1821 and sold to Portuguese slave traders. Before leaving port, his ship was boarded by a Royal Navy ship under the command of Captain Henry Leeke, and Crowther was taken to Freetown, Sierra Leone and released. While there, Crowther was cared for by the Anglican Church Missionary Society, who taught him English. He converted to Christianity, was baptized by Rev. John Raban, and took the name Samuel Crowther in 1825.
In 1841 Crowther was selected to accompany the missionary James Frederick Schön on an expedition along the Niger River. The goal of the expedition was to spread commerce, teach agricultural techniques, spread Christianity, and help end the slave trade. Following the expedition, Crowther was recalled to England, where he was trained as a minister and ordained by the bishop of London. He returned to Africa in 1843 and with Henry Townsend, opened a mission in Abeokuta, in today's Ogun State, Nigeria.

Rev. Dr. Crowther began translating the bible into the Yoruba language and compiling a Yoruba dictionary.[3]

Hudson Taylor

Taylor was born to James and Amelia Taylor, a Methodist couple fascinated with the Far East who had prayed for their newborn, "Grant that he may work for you in China." Years later, a teenage Hudson experienced a spiritual birth during an intense time of prayer as he lay stretched, as he later put, "before Him with unspeakable awe and unspeakable joy." He spent the next years in frantic preparation, learning the rudiments of medicine, studying Mandarin, and immersing himself ever deeper into the Bible and prayer.

His ship arrived in Shanghai, one of five "treaty ports" China had opened to foreigners following its first Opium War with England. Almost immediately Taylor made a radical decision (as least for Protestant missionaries of the day): he decided to dress in Chinese clothes and grow a pigtail (as Chinese men did). His fellow Protestants were either incredulous or critical.

Taylor, for his part, was not happy with most missionaries he saw: he believed they were "worldly" and spent too much time with English businessmen and diplomats who needed their services as translators. Instead, Taylor wanted the Christian faith taken to the interior of China. So within months of arriving, and the native language still a challenge, Taylor, along with Joseph Edkins, set off for the interior, setting sail down the Huangpu River distributing Chinese Bibles and tracts.

When the Chinese Evangelization Society, which had sponsored Taylor, proved incapable of paying its missionaries in 1857, Taylor resigned and became an independent missionary; trusting God to meet his needs. The same year, he married Maria Dyer, daughter of missionaries stationed in China. He continued to pour himself into his work, and his small church in Ningpo grew to 21 members. But by 1861, he became seriously ill (probably with hepatitis) and was forced to return to England to recover.[4]

Florence Selina Harriet Young (1856-1940),

Florence Selina Harriet Young (1856-1940), missionary, was born on 10 October 1856 at Motueka, near Nelson, New Zealand, fifth child of Henry Young, farmer, and his wife Catherine Anne, née Eccles, both Plymouth Brethren from England

Settling in Sydney in 1878, after the death of her parents Florence moved in 1882 to Fairymead, a sugar plantation near Bundaberg, Queensland, run by two of her brothers. With timidity, she began to hold prayer meetings for planters' families and, with one assistant, established the Young People's Scriptural Union which eventually attracted 4000 members. Her attentions were increasingly devoted to the Melanesian sugarworkers whose responsiveness to kindness she applauded and whose 'heathen' customs and 'addictions' to 'white men's vices' she abhorred. Asking that God instruct 'the teacher and the scholars', she conducted classes in pidgin English, using pictures, rote biblical phrases and a chrysalis to explain the resurrection.

Under Miss Young's guidance, the Queensland Kanaka Mission was formally established at Fairymead in 1886 as an evangelical, non-denominational church. Relying on unsolicited subscriptions and stressing 'salvation before education or civilization', it spread to other plantations and won considerable approval. The Q.K.M. aimed to prepare the Melanesians for membership of established Christian churches after their repatriation and employed paid missionaries and members of Florence's extended family. Reassuring in its message of hope, its open-air hymn singing and its mass baptisms in local rivers, at its height in 1904-05 the Q.K.M. engaged nineteen missionaries and 118 unpaid 'native teachers', and claimed 2150 conversions. As she embraced departing converts, Florence exhorted them: 'No forget 'im Jesus'.[5]

The effect of Theological revaluation on the growth of the church

Darwinism

During the life time of Charles Darwin he published a number of books that claimed to show how life developed or evolved into its present forms. According to Darwin’s theory, the most fit of species survive and the week are destroyed. Science man is obliviously the most highly evolved animal, he is assumed to meagrely a sophisticated ape.

The idea of evolution have challenged Christianity continually until modern times. Christians saw the theory of evolution is a direct challenge to the view that man is created by a wise and a loving god the creator. The indirect impact of  evolution , however was even greater then the direct challenge. The philosophy behind Darwin’s theory was that man was getting better and better.

Many new inventions of man proved this fact. Christianity the highest of all religions must also be a product of evolution which some day will surpass all religion.

Theological liberalism,

 Sometimes known as Protestant Liberalism, is a theological movement rooted in the early 19th century German Enlightenment, notably in the philosophy of Imanuel Kant and the religious views of Friedrich Schleiermacher. It is an attempt to incorporate modern thinking and developments, especially in the sciences, into the Christian faith. Liberalism tends to emphasize ethics over doctrine and experience over Scriptural authority. While essentially a 19th century movement, theological liberalism came to dominate the American mainline churches in the early 20th century. Liberal Christian scholars embraced and encouraged the higher biblical criticism of modern Biblical scholarship.

Protestant liberal thought in its most traditional incarnations emphasized the universal Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the infinite value of the human soul, the example of Jesus, and the establishment of the moral-ethical kingdom of God   on Earth. It has often been relativistic, pluralistic, and non-doctrinal.[6]

Communism

Lenins victory in the famous October Revelution of 1917 in Russia established a new system of government controlled by the Communist. Private property including church property was confiscated. The communist government emptied Monasteries and church building turned into museums and gymnasiums. Thousands of priests and monks were sent to prision camps were they died. All evangelism and religious education was banned.

Conon

Conclusion

The purpose of the modern mission was to create an avenue by which the protestant Church could attempt to fulfil the great commission. William Carey’s vision caught on and through the midst of persecution, war, social and political unrest there were men and women ready to pick up the torch and keep the fire lit. In spite of disagreements and setbacks the modern missionary Movement prevailed, exploding churches, converting thousands, and reaching the poor and dying in their greatest need.

Bibliography

[1] “The Christian Missionary Movement in the Modern Era” available from  www.philadelphiaproject.co.za/downloads/christian/christian_misionary_movement_modern_era.pdf assessed on 14 Nov. 2016

[2]“Christian history” Available from  http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-36/why-did-1800s-explode-with-missions.html, assessed on 14 November 2016

[3] “SAMUEL AJAYI CROWTHER” available from   http://satucket.com/lectionary/samuel_crowther.htm , assessed on 14 November 2016

[4] “Christian history” Available from  http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/people/missionaries/hudson-taylor.html

[5] “ Australian dictionary of Biography“ Available from http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/young-florence-selina-9214 accessed on 14 Nov 2016

[6] “Theopedia" available from http://www.theopedia.com/theological-liberalism assessed on 14 Nov. 2016